A basic principle of anti-developmentalism says that a society full of capital is an urban society, which is why a society without capital must be an agrarian society. From this perspective, a liberated urban space would therefore have to be a de-urbanized space. This does not mean the disappearance of the city, which has already been accomplished by the conurbation, but the positive supersession of the city-country opposition and the radical rejection of the decay of both realities into an amorphous sludge. The recovery of the city, the axis of the project in which urban struggles must be inscribed, is paradoxically a process of ruralization.
Urban struggles must reveal a new subject, a new proletariat that does not deny by affirming, but affirms by denying; a proletariat that does not seek to universalize the working class condition, but rejects it outright. If it does not question labor itself, it does not question capital: real anti-capitalism is anti-workerist. In order for a collective subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, a class, to constitute itself, it must create its specific space from which it can join forces against the enemy class. The space of capital, populated with wage workers, motorists and consumers, is not adequate for this purpose. It must be transformed, and to do this the first thing that must be done is to deliver it from the grasp of the market. It must cease to be a space of labor, of consumption, of circulation, of leisure, etc. In the new liberated space, its inhabitants must achieve a sufficient degree of autonomy (with regard to food, clothing, shoes, education, transport, health, self-defense, information, etc.). Autonomy is the precondition for the negation of capitalism, the anti-capitalist class, to be able to exist.
Miguel Amorós
Autonomy from capital is not to be found in the appropriation of capitalist means of production, for the latter are grounded in and generate the oppressive relations of social reproduction that underlie it. Anti-capitalism demands the creation of spaces beyond capital, what Miguel Amorós calls “territory”, a sort of inter-zone between controlled urban space and colonised and/or abandoned rural spaces (e.g. the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes).
A further contribution to our understanding of our present, as part of a series on “May 68 writers”, sharing the work of Amorós, Jaime Semprun, Amedeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.
Miguel Amorós: Between capitalism and anti-capitalism – the struggle for territory (1)
It is revolutionary to know how to make a loaf of bread, but it is also revolutionary to know how to make a barricade. Its segregation as well as its resistance do not have the goal of its isolated survival but the consolidation of community and the abolition of capitalism. The reestablishment of open council meetings, the creation of social “currency”, reducing the length of the circuits between production and consumption, or the recovery of the communal lands, should not be “alter-capitalist” paths and pretexts for inactivity or citizenism. Their purpose in the domain of the oikos is the production of use values, not exchange values. They are not the identifying symbols of the rural hipster ghetto, but distinct aspects of a single struggle, the struggle for a territory emancipated from the commodity and the state, whose atmosphere will make everyone who breathes it free. They are elements of the greatest importance upon whose correct combination an effective strategy that can lead the forces of historical consciousness to victory will depend. Its elaboration is the task of the anti-developmentalist critique, which, unlike other types of critique, does not get bogged down in abstract theoretical generalizations nor does it assume a position of pure negativity or activist positivity, because, in a quite concrete way, it knows what it wants. That is why it does not try to catch the moon in its reflection on the water. It knows exactly where to look to find things.
Miguel Amorós
The concept of “territory” is at the heart of Miguel Amorós’ critical thought. It is both the lens through which he reads the violence of capitalism (capitalism is the appropriation and commodification of all social life bound to territory) and the emancipatory practices of radical, anti-capitalist politics (anti-capitalism demands the liberation of territory from the State and Capital, and the (re)-creating of territorial social relations through the free, collective ruralisation of urban spaces and the overcoming of the rural-urban divide of colonised territory).
The overlapping consequences of such a vision are significant: anti-capitalism can only define itself in a total rejection of capitalist social relations; (the desire for) re-territorialisation is the condition for the possibility of constituting a revolutionary subject, a subject possessed by/of an orientation in the space and time opposed to the alienation and commodity production of spectacle; the making of territory is essential for the reconstitution of history, and thus for the possibility of an emancipatory history.
Without territory, we are lost: cut off from that which ultimately sustains human communities, the land; condemned to subjection to managerial-technical “solutions” for the multiple crises of our times, or deluded by”utopian” nostalgia; severed from that which situates us (orientation in time and space) and gives us depth of agency (subjectivity).
The struggle for territory is the struggle against the alienation that perpetuates the production and reproduction of the State and Capital and the struggle for autonomous forms of life.
We share below the first of two essays by Amorós on “territory”, further contributions to our series on the “May 68 writers” Amorós, Jaime Semprun, Amedeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.
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